Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Novem5er » Mon Oct 31, 2016 10:49 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 31, 2016 11:00 pm
Final Days
Trump’s advisers are working hard to plan their own futures while riding out the roller-coaster end of the campaign.
By Gabriel Sherman
“I’m on the battlefield right now, which is amazing,” Donald Trump said as he surveyed the Gettysburg National Military Park. “When you talk about historic, this is the whole ballgame.” It was the afternoon of October 22, and Trump was speaking by phone shortly after delivering a speech at the place where Lincoln pledged to unite a divided country. Trump had used the same location to pledge lawsuits against the women accusing him of grabbing them by the pussy. “I feel really good,” Trump continued, making his way to the motorcade to leave for the campaign’s next rally, in Virginia. “We had three polls this week that came out where we’re No. 1. I think we’re going to have a very big surprise in store for a lot of people.”
Even given the October surprise of the FBI’s reviewing a new batch of emails that may be related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server, Trump still faces difficult odds. But he is ending the race much as he got into it: not worrying too much about the future and not listening to any of the advisers around him. In recent weeks, I spoke with more than two dozen current and former Trump advisers, friends, and senior Republican officials, many of whom would speak only off the record given that the campaign is not yet over. What they described was an unmanageable candidate who still does not fully understand the power of the movement he has tapped into, who can’t see that it is larger than himself.
“I got really mad at him the other day,” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told me. “He said, ‘I think we’ll win, and if not, that’s okay too. And I said, ‘It’s not okay! You can’t say that! Your dry-cleaning bill is like the annual salaries of the people who came to your rallies, and they believe in you!’ ”
Trump may not be all that focused on what happens to the masses of white, nativist, working-class voters who have coalesced around him, but there are people in the campaign who recognize how valuable those Trump believers could be long after the election is over. As Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported, Trump’s son-in-law–cum–de facto campaign manager Jared Kushner is building a proprietary database of some 14 million email addresses and credit-card numbers of Trump supporters. That list could form the foundation of a new Trump media company. According to one Republican briefed on the talks, Kushner has approached Wall Street bankers and pitched ideas for media start-ups. “How do we monetize this?” he’s asked. (Through a spokesperson, Kushner denied having such meetings.)
Campaign CEO Stephen Bannon, who is taking a leave of absence from his role as executive chairman of Breitbart News to work with the Trump team, has an even bigger ambition for all those voters: reshaping the GOP and future elections. “The main goal for Steve was dealing a devastating blow to the permanent political class,” Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow told me. “It’s pretty clear he’s upended the Republican Establishment, so it’s a huge win for Steve’s ideas and for Breitbart’s ideas.” If the Republican Party of the past was full of rich fiscal conservatives who benefited from free trade, low taxes, low regulation, and low-wage immigrant labor, Bannon envisions a new party that is home to working-class whites, grassroots conservatives, libertarians, populists, and disaffected millennials who had gravitated toward the Bernie Sanders campaign — in other words, Trump supporters.
It’s clear that this until-now-underserved group has tremendous potential, both commercially and politically. But Trump doesn’t seem to know what to do with them beyond stoking their anger. In terms of the future, he is falling back on what he knows, bolstering the businesses that have suffered during the campaign. In recent days, Trump has dragged the national press corps to his new Washington hotel and his Miami-Dade golf course, essentially turning the campaign into a giant infomercial for his luxury properties. “Our bookings are doing great!” he told me. “The political involvement has made my clubs hotter because of this avalanche of earned media.”
The paradox is that Trump’s political brand and his commercial brand are very much at odds. “The people who are passionate about his brand can’t afford it right now,” a real-estate executive who knows Trump told me. And those who can afford it are less likely to want to be associated with his name. “He might have to go into multifamily rentals. Maybe he could put gold fixtures in a trailer park,” said the executive.
In the end, whether he figures out how to change his business model and capitalize on his followers hardly matters. “Trump is the vehicle,” Marlow said. Now there is momentum, with or without him.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 28. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
Perhaps the most surprising thing to ponder at this late stage in the election is just how close the race could have been had he taken nearly any of the advice offered to him by advisers. “This thing was doable if we did it the right way,” one adviser told me.
When Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican lobbyist and operative cut from Establishment cloth — he’d worked on Gerald Ford’s, George H.W. Bush’s, and Bob Dole’s presidential campaigns — came onboard to serve as campaign chairman at the beginning of the general-election season, he suggested a strategy that was the exact opposite of the one Trump pursued in the primaries. He wanted Trump to lower his profile, which would force the media to focus on Clinton — a flawed opponent with historic unfavorable ratings who couldn’t erase the stain of scandal, real or invented. “The best thing we can do is to have you move into a cave for the next four months,” Manafort told Trump during a meeting. “If you’re not on the campaign trail, the focus is on her, and we win. Whoever the focus is on will lose.”
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As is typical with most campaigns, Manafort wanted the Trump team to perform opposition research on its own candidate, so that the team would know what to be worried about and how to prepare for it. Manafort had known Trump since the ’80s and had heard rumors about his behavior with women, according to a source. He wanted to know what was out there. But Trump — perhaps believing that the Clinton campaign would never bring up women for fear of the specter of Bill’s past, or perhaps believing that it wouldn’t matter if they did (the “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” hubris) — declined. The only information the campaign had to go on was the research the RNC had done into all of the candidates’ public statements.
In late April, Manafort assured RNC members that Trump would pivot to a more presidential “persona.” And for a while, it worked. Trump began using a teleprompter, cut back his TV appearances, and (mostly) avoided courting scandal. His poll numbers climbed, until he was tied with Clinton.
But asking Trump to not be the center of attention is like asking him not to breathe. “His ego couldn’t handle it,” said one Republican close to the campaign. “Hillary understood that Trump needed to be the focus.” As his poll numbers climbed, Trump felt he didn’t need to listen to Manafort. “The worst part about Trump is when he was ahead,” the prominent Republican said. “He’d get into the lead and then he would veer off and start defending his interests and his honor and it had nothing to do with what people actually care about. He’s not disciplined.”
In early July, Manafort recruited then–Fox News chairman Roger Ailes to advise Trump on debate prep and the staging of the Republican National Convention. (He also tried to get Apprentice creator Mark Burnett to chip in, but Burnett declined.) According to a Republican briefed on the meeting, Ailes attended a session at Trump’s penthouse shortly before the RNC, but “Donald wanted to talk about anything but the debates.” Ailes did suggest that Trump make an appearance at the convention every night to create drama, which he did. (Reached for comment, Ailes lawyer Susan Estrich said: “Roger has been friends with Donald for 30 years and has offered informal advice from time to time.”)
Trump got a post-convention bounce and was ahead of Clinton by a point. “What he needs to do,” Newt Gingrich told me, “is focus on the big issues.” Instead he got sidetracked on something any political operative could have told him was a losing battle: feuding with the bereaved Muslim-American parents of a soldier who had died in Iraq.
“You do know you just attacked a Gold Star family?” one adviser warned Trump.
Trump didn’t know what a Gold Star family was: “What’s that?” he asked.
To Trump, Khizr Khan and his wife, Ghazala, were enemies who had said something mean about him, just like Rosie O’Donnell and any number of people who had gotten under his skin over the years. Wasn’t it his right to respond?
“ ‘The election is about the American people, it’s not about you,’ ” Manafort told Trump, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Trump countered with Breitbart’s report on Khan’s purported belief in Sharia. “ ‘He’s not running for president,’ ” Manafort shot back. “ ‘The Clintons did this to us to waste our time getting off message.’ ”
Instead of criticizing his angry tweets, Conway would suggest he include a few positive ones: “It’s like saying to someone, ‘How about having two brownies and not six?’”
With his poll numbers back in a downward spiral, Trump got an earful from one of his larger backers, the hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, at a Hamptons fund-raiser in mid-August. Mercer complained to Trump that the campaign was in disarray, a source briefed on the conversation said. During a debate-prep session the following day in Bedminster, New
Jersey, Trump took it out on Manafort in front of senior advisers, including Ailes. “He complained Paul was not able to get the media to focus on the right stuff,” one attendee recalled.
Ailes, who had by this point been ousted from Fox News in a sexualharassment scandal, grew tired of Trump’s unwillingness to focus on the debates and drifted away from the campaign, according to sources close to Ailes. “He hasn’t been involved,” Trump confirmed. “I’ve maybe had two calls with Roger in the last two months.”
Manafort, too, would soon resign, having become the kind of distraction he was often warning Trump away from. Damaging reports of his lobbying ties to the Kremlin were making Trump’s pro-Putin statements look worse than ever. Besides, it was clear that Manafort had lost the trust of his candidate.
“Paul Manafort didn’t understand him,” a longtime Trump confidant told me. “Trump is going to do whatever the fuck he wants. You have to trick him into doing what you want.”
No one understands this better than Manafort’s successors. To hear Kellyanne Conway talk about managing her boss is to listen to a mother of four who has had ample experience with unruly toddlers. Instead of criticizing Trump’s angry tweets, for instance, she suggested that he also include a few positive ones. “You had these people saying, ‘Delete the app! Stop tweeting!’ ” she recalled. “I would say, ‘Here are a couple of cool things we should tweet today.’ It’s like saying to someone, ‘How about having two brownies and not six?’ ”
Conway had grown close to the Trumps, especially Ivanka, through a connection to the Mercer family. During the primaries, Conway had run a pro–Ted Cruz super-pac, which the Mercers had funded; after Cruz dropped out, she started advising Trump. The key to managing Trump, she told me, is to let him feel like he is in control — always. “It all has to be his decision in the end,” she said. A Trump donor explained it this way: “Trump has the following personality: NIH-NFW, meaning ‘If it’s not invented here, not invented behind these eyes, then it’s no fucking way.’ ”
When she was promoted to campaign manager in mid-August, Conway met with Trump in his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. She told him two things: that he was losing and that he was running a joyless campaign. “What would make you happier in the job?” she asked.
“ ‘I miss flying around and giving rallies when it was just a couple of us on the plane,’ ” he told her.
So Conway encouraged Trump to go on the road and traveled with him to serve as a moderating influence. Mainly, she wanted him to “show his humanity.” She tried to get him to improve his image with women by appealing to his business sense. “You have to find new customers,” she told him. Another strategy she employed with him stemmed from the fact that Trump is such an avid cable-news viewer: “A way you can communicate with him is you go on TV to communicate,” she said. That doesn’t mean Trump took the advice. Conway said that plenty of her ideas “never saw the light of day,” adding that “we had too little time to do certain meaningful things in a consequential way, like implement a full outreach to Evangelicals, Catholics, and, of course, women.”
Not long after Conway became campaign manager, she was joined in the campaign leadership by Bannon. The two knew each other through their mutual connection to the Mercers (the family invested millions in Breitbart) and by all accounts are supportive of each other’s roles in the Trump universe. But they differ on some significant points: Conway has argued that Trump should position himself as a more traditional, limited-government conservative, according to one senior adviser, whereas Bannon wanted to use Trump to shift the whole party toward a more nationalist-populist message.
A shaggy-haired former Navy officer and Goldman Sachs banker, Bannon had, through his role at Breitbart, become a leader of the conservative movement’s new power center. From his desk in the 14th-floor war room at Trump Tower, Bannon developed a plan for Trump to go full-on Breitbart. He ratcheted up Trump’s already-paranoid speeches, casting the candidate — and his followers — as the victims of a worldwide conspiracy of the elite. “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” Trump told a crowd in West Palm Beach. “This is a struggle for the survival of our nation, believe me.”
Bannon, for the most part, didn’t mind Trump’s aggressive rants, crude language, and appeals to his supporters’ baser instincts. He encouraged Trump to confront his critics head-on: It was his idea to go to Mexico and Flint, Michigan. “Steve is a smashmouth guy, and so is Trump and so is Breitbart, and that’s what people want right now,” said Breitbart’s Marlow.
Ultimately, though, Bannon and Conway have struggled with Trump the same way Manafort did. On the morning of the first debate, Trump was up two points in a Bloomberg poll, but the lead evaporated after he spent the next week needlessly attacking a former Miss Universe. “It’s his campaign,” Conway said. “He’s the candidate.”
One reason Conway and Bannon have been safe from Trump’s wrath despite his poor performance in the polls: They have the trust of the Trump children, especially Ivanka and, by extension, her husband. Perhaps no one has more experience at trying to manage Trump than his eldest daughter. Ivanka, who declined to comment, has tried to temper him at various stages of the campaign, but it has proved impossible, even for her, to keep him on message. According to sources, Ivanka is especially worried that the campaign has caused lasting damage to the family business. “She thinks this is not good for the brand. She would like to distance herself from it. She’s seen some of the pressures the hotels have come under,” one adviser said. In June, Trump’s Miami-Dade golf course lost its PGA tournament to Mexico City. By October, rates had been slashed at the company’s flagship Washington, D.C., hotel, presumably because it was underbooked. And this fall, the family abandoned the Trump name when it launched a new chain of hotels.
Still, even Ivanka has been battle-hardened, to a certain degree, by this election. Before the first debate, she advised her father not to mention Bill Clinton’s accusers. “She wanted to soften him. ‘The women are not the issue, Bill Clinton is not running,’ ” an adviser said she told him. And Trump, at the time, listened. “Trump knows she’s 100 percent loyal to him, so there’s no fear of another agenda.”
But Conway told me that on the day the Access Hollywood tape leaked, Ivanka took her father’s side completely. “She was defiant,” Conway recalled. “She told him, ‘It’s 11 years old, you have to fight back. You have to say you’re sorry. But you have to fight back.’ ” Still, she and Kushner were not happy about Bannon’s plan to bring Bill Clinton’s accusers to the second presidential debate to “rattle Bill and Hillary before she took the stage.”
Another way Ivanka has tried to exert influence on the campaign is by positioning Kushner to all but run it. “You have to remember something: Jared is the final decision-maker,” a senior adviser said — except, he noted, when Trump is. Trump and his son-in-law are by all appearances close. “Jared is a brilliant young man,” Trump told me. Kushner, a lifelong Democrat, declined to comment, but a Republican close to the campaign said of his feelings: “Jared doesn’t look at supporting the campaign as taking a philosophical position. He’s opportunistic.”
In recent weeks, Kushner has served as an all-purpose fixer for the campaign. According to sources, he recruited Clinton-era CIA director James Woolsey to advise Trump on national security. Kushner’s access to Trump has caused friction with senior advisers who have chafed at his lack of experience. According to one adviser, Kushner told pollster Tony Fabrizio during the convention that the campaign didn’t need to conduct focus groups. “ ‘I can tell from the applause what’s working,’ ” Kushner said, according to this source. Kushner, through a spokesperson, denied having said this, but it is in keeping with the go-with-your-gut approach of the Trump campaign. According to the adviser, Trump rejected television ads on Benghazi and the economy that tested the best with focus groups. “I know what works,” Trump told his team. (According to a source, Trump ad-maker Rick Reed quietly withdrew from the campaign in October.)
The merits of focus groups aside, Kushner definitely likes data. He and Brad Parscale, a digital strategist who got into Trumpworld by designing websites for the Trump children, began ramping up the campaign’s data operation before the convention. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek profile of the campaign’s data team, which according to a campaign source Kushner cooperated with, portrays Kushner as a social-media innovator. “Trump knows nothing about it; this is Jared’s thing,” a senior adviser told me. “Jared was smart enough to know the key to power was money. He set the data operation up to raise money.”
Now Kushner is looking to create his own piece of the family business with a new media venture. The campaign launched a nightly newscast on Facebook called Trump Tower Live that many people see as a trial balloon for an eventual Trump TV. The broadcast has a decidedly public-access feel but adopts many of the elements of cable news: It features a panel of guests and a “crawl” of pro-Trump headlines across the bottom of the screen. Around the office, they joke that if Trump TV comes to fruition, Conway could host The Kellyanne File.
But some are skeptical of Trump TV because of the same issues that plagued Trump’s campaign: his lack of discipline and commitment. “It’s too expensive. Trump won’t put his own money in,” one prominent Republican told me. According to another Republican, Sean Hannity told conservative radio host Mark Levin he wouldn’t leave Fox to join Trump TV. (“I’ve never even discussed Trump TV with anyone,” Hannity told me.) For his part, Bannon has called the idea of Trump TV a “big, big lift,” and Breitbart’s Marlow said his boss was coming back after the election.
Trump, too, shot down the television speculation. “The last thing on my mind is doing or even thinking about Trump TV,” he told me. One reason it’s impossible to divine Trump’s media ambitions is because promoting Trump TV would effectively mean the campaign is conceding the election. “It would be a dereliction of duty to talk about it,” one senior adviser said.
One might wonder then about the campaign’s decision to publicly tout its data program — and what it might be used for after the election is over, whether that’s a media company or a political operation or some hybrid of the two. According to many close observers of the campaign, the political operatives are starting to position themselves for what comes after a loss. “It’s a window into a campaign in a downward spiral when the positioning begins,” a veteran of Mitt Romney’s 2012 run said, “but I’ve never seen it begin this early.”
In recent weeks, the mood at Trump Tower has veered between despair and denial—with a hit of resurgent glee when the news broke that the FBI was looking into more of Clinton’s emails. When I asked one senior Trump adviser to describe the scene inside, he responded: “Think of the bunker right before Hitler killed himself. Donald’s in denial. They’re all in denial.” (As Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, in a tweet, “In Trumpworld as Hitler’s Bunker terms,” the FBI investigation is “like when Goebbels thought FDR’s death would save the Nazi regime.”)
During our conversation, Trump sounded more like a guy who is happy to have finished his first marathon with zero training than the divisive presidential candidate who ignited the biggest cultural upheaval since 1968. And to hear him tell it, there’s only upside to come, win or lose. While Trump recently told a donor that he estimates the campaign diminished his net worth by $800 million, he says the effect is only temporary. “He believes he’ll have a full restoration of that inside of a year,” the donor said. “His view is the American public has a two-to-three-week attention span.” He may be right about that.
Trump is one of the most famous people alive now, and what he wants to do with that fame is unclear. Whatever it is will no doubt be as improvised as his whole campaign was. Trump says what he wants is some peace and quiet. “I can’t walk around. Not that it was easy to do before, but getting privacy back, at least a certain degree of privacy back, wouldn’t be bad,” he said. Trump told a donor at a recent fund-raiser that he planned to take a six-month vacation if he loses. “Look,” the donor told me, “he’s 70 years old. He’s going to hit the golf course or he’ll be in Scotland. He loves it there.”
But one can’t imagine that Trump, having tasted the ego fuel of tens of thousands of people chanting his name at a rally, will be able to forgo that feeling for long. He speaks of his followers fondly and is as bullish on them as he is on himself. “I think the movement stays together,” Trump told me in Pennsylvania as his motorcade sped to the airport. “Look, I just left Gettysburg, and all of the people are waving and shouting, ‘We love you, Mr. Trump.’ And I love them. There’s a movement here that’s very special. There’s never been anything like it.”
He couldn’t be more right about that.
*This article appears in the October 31, 2016, issue of New York Magazine.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... -days.html
by Novem5er » Mon Oct 31, 2016 11:10 pm
by Freitag » Mon Oct 31, 2016 11:35 pm
Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and STEVEN LEE MYERSOCT. 31, 2016
WASHINGTON — For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.
Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.
Hillary Clinton’s supporters, angry over what they regard as a lack of scrutiny of Mr. Trump by law enforcement officials, pushed for these investigations. In recent days they have also demanded that James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., discuss them publicly, as he did last week when he announced that a new batch of emails possibly connected to Mrs. Clinton had been discovered.
Supporters of Mrs. Clinton have argued that Mr. Trump’s evident affinity for Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — Mr. Trump has called him a great leader and echoed his policies toward NATO, Ukraine and the war in Syria — and the hacks of leading Democrats like John D. Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign, are clear indications that Russia has taken sides in the presidential race and that voters should know what the F.B.I. has found.
The F.B.I.’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue, as does the investigation into the emails involving Mrs. Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, on a computer she shared with her estranged husband, Anthony D. Weiner. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters argue that voters have as much right to know what the F.B.I. has found in Mr. Trump’s case, even if the findings are not yet conclusive.
“You do not hear the director talking about any other investigation he is involved in,” Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Democrat of New York, said after Mr. Comey’s letter to Congress was made public. “Is he investigating the Trump Foundation? Is he looking into the Russians hacking into all of our emails? Is he looking into and deciding what is going on with regards to other allegations of the Trump Organization?”
Mr. Comey would not even confirm the existence of any investigation of Mr. Trump’s aides when asked during an appearance in September before Congress. In the Obama administration’s internal deliberations over identifying the Russians as the source of the hacks, Mr. Comey also argued against doing so and succeeded in keeping the F.B.I.’s imprimatur off the formal findings, a law enforcement official said. His stance was first reported by CNBC.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, responded angrily on Sunday with a letter accusing the F.B.I. of not being forthcoming about Mr. Trump’s alleged ties with Moscow.
“It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity,” Mr. Reid wrote. “The public has a right to know this information.”
F.B.I. officials declined to comment on Monday. Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Mr. Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Republican presidential candidate. Still, they have said that Mr. Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.
At least one part of the investigation has involved Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for much of the year. Mr. Manafort, a veteran Republican political strategist, has had extensive business ties in Russia and other former Soviet states, especially Ukraine, where he served as an adviser to that country’s ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych.
But the focus in that case was on Mr. Manafort’s ties with a kleptocratic government in Ukraine — and whether he had declared the income in the United States — and not necessarily on any Russian influence over Mr. Trump’s campaign, one official said.
In classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump. They focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin.
F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 “look-up” messages — a first step for one system’s computers to talk to another — to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.
The most serious part of the F.B.I.’s investigation has focused on the computer hacks that the Obama administration now formally blames on Russia. That investigation also involves numerous officials from the intelligence agencies. Investigators, the officials said, have become increasingly confident, based on the evidence they have uncovered, that Russia’s direct goal is not to support the election of Mr. Trump, as many Democrats have asserted, but rather to disrupt the integrity of the political system and undermine America’s standing in the world more broadly.
The hacking, they said, reflected an intensification of spy-versus-spy operations that never entirely abated after the Cold War but that have become more aggressive in recent years as relations with Mr. Putin’s Russia have soured.
A senior intelligence official, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing national security investigation, said the Russians had become adept at exploiting computer vulnerabilities created by the relative openness of and reliance on the internet. Election officials in several states have reported what appeared to be cyberintrusions from Russia, and while many doubt that an Election Day hack could alter the outcome of the election, the F.B.I. agencies across the government are on alert for potential disruptions that could wreak havoc with the voting process itself.
“It isn’t about the election,” a second senior official said, referring to the aims of Russia’s interference. “It’s about a threat to democracy.”
The investigation has treated it as a counterintelligence operation as much as a criminal one, though agents are also focusing on whether anyone in the United States was involved. The officials declined to discuss any individual targets of the investigation, even when assured of anonymity.
As has been the case with the investigation into Mrs. Clinton, the F.B.I. has come under intense partisan political pressure — something the bureau’s leaders have long sought to avoid. Supporters of both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump have been equally impassioned in calling for investigations — and even in providing leads for investigators to follow.
Mr. Reid, in a letter to Mr. Comey in August, asserted that Mr. Trump’s campaign “has employed a number of individuals with significant and disturbing ties to the Russia and the Kremlin.” Although Mr. Reid cited no evidence and offered no names explicitly, he clearly referred to one of Mr. Trump’s earlier campaign advisers, Carter Page.
Mr. Page, a former Merrill Lynch banker who founded an investment company in New York, Global Energy Capital, drew attention during the summer for a speech in which he criticized the United States and other Western nations for a “hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change” in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
Mr. Page responded with his own letter to Mr. Comey, denying wrongdoing and calling Mr. Reid’s accusations “a witch hunt.” In an interview, he said that he had never been contacted by the F.B.I. and that the accusations were baseless and purely partisan because of his policy views on Russia. “These people really seem to be grasping at straws,” he said.
Democrats have also accused another Republican strategist and Trump confidant, Roger Stone, of being a conduit between the Russian hackers and WikiLeaks, which has published the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Mr. Podesta, the Clinton campaign manager. Mr. Stone boasted of having contacts with the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and appeared to predict the hacking of Mr. Podesta’s account, though he later denied having any prior knowledge.
Mr. Stone derided the accusations and those raised by Michael J. Morell, a former C.I.A. director and a Clinton supporter, who has called Mr. Trump “an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” In an article on the conservative news site Breitbart, Mr. Stone denied having links to Russians and called the accusations “the new McCarthyism.”
by Nordic » Tue Nov 01, 2016 1:40 am
by 8bitagent » Tue Nov 01, 2016 4:42 am
Novem5er » Mon Oct 31, 2016 10:10 pm wrote:That was one of the best Hitler Reacts videos that I've seen. It very well summed up the Republican party up until last week. Right after the Bush tape came out, I announced to all my politically minded friends that Trump was done - stick a fork in him.
Now, I'm not so sure. I think people have become numb to Trump's piggishness and are focusing more on Hillary's faults. At this point I cannot say who is going to win.
by 82_28 » Tue Nov 01, 2016 5:29 am
by Morty » Tue Nov 01, 2016 6:55 am
Feminist Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton: ‘The Woman Is a Disaster’
by Dr. Susan Berry 28 Oct 2016
Hillary Clinton’s “gender card” politics is rubbing feminist Camille Paglia the wrong way.
In an interview with The Spectator, Paglia tells journalist Emily Hill that Clinton’s claim that her election to the presidency would break the final pane of the glass ceiling is balderdash:
It’s an outrage how she’s played the gender card. She is a woman without accomplishment. “I sponsored or co-sponsored 400 bills.” Oh really? These were bills to rename bridges and so forth. And the things she has accomplished have been like the destabilization of North Africa, causing refugees to flood into Italy… The woman is a disaster!
Having already voted once for Jill Stein of the Green Party, the 69-year-old professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia asserts she’s already voted for a woman for president, so it’s no big deal. Paglia’s view of feminism is light years away from the likes of Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who told young women there would be a “special place in hell” for them if they chose Bernie Sanders over Clinton.
“My philosophy of feminism, I call street-smart Amazon feminism,” Paglia explains. “I’m from an immigrant family. The way I was brought up was: the world is a dangerous place; you must learn to defend yourself. You can’t be a fool. You have to stay alert.”
Nowadays, however, the author of soon-to-be-published Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism finds young girls are protected and coddled as they’re taught to become “helpless victims” when life becomes challenging.
“We are rocketing backwards here to the Victorian period with this belief that women are not capable of making decisions on their own,” she says. “This is not feminism — which is to achieve independent thought and action. There will never be equality of the sexes if we think that women are so handicapped they can’t look after themselves.”
And, of course, that is the image of women conveyed by Clinton and her feminist colleagues. At a recent campaign stop in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Clinton – with daughter Chelsea in tow – told an audience of mostly women and young people that women need taxpayer-funded assistance, courtesy of the government, from cradle to grave in order to survive.
“We have to look at the whole life cycle,” Clinton said, echoing the “Life of Julia” presented by Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. That campaign initiative demonstrated how a fictitious woman named “Julia” fared better throughout her entire life because of big government policies promoted by Obama over those of his then opponent, Republican Mitt Romney.
“It should not be so hard to be a young parent,” Clinton said in Haverford. “And it should not be so hard on the other end of the age spectrum to take care of your loved one.”
“People say, ‘I can’t get the help I need for myself, my spouse, my child,’” she continued. “There’s just not enough help. Women tell me these stories about how hard it is. They tell me not only do they have no paid family leave, they have no earned sick days.”
But, for Paglia – who is pro-prostitutes and pro-porn – women should not be expecting special treatment. The feminists she reveres urged women to be tough and fight their own battles with the intention of winning them. Her favorite live feminist, according to Hill, is Germaine Greer, while Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn are at the top of her list of those feminists no longer with us.
“I do not believe in quotas of any kind,” she asserts. “If Hillary wins, nothing will change. She knows the bureaucracy, all the offices of government and that’s what she likes to do, sit behind the scenes and manipulate the levers of power.”
A Trump victory, however, says Paglia, will be “an amazing moment of change because it would destroy the power structure of the Republican party, the power structure of the Democratic party and destroy the power of the media.”
“It would be an incredible release of energy… at a moment of international tension and crisis,” she adds.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 01, 2016 8:24 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 01, 2016 8:53 am
by 82_28 » Tue Nov 01, 2016 9:29 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 01, 2016 9:37 am
82_28 » Tue Nov 01, 2016 8:29 am wrote:Hey now! I never bicker. I've never cared for Paglia either, for the record. Every once in awhile I read something I agreed with or made me think. But for the most part yeah, no.
it is why we all love you so much 
by Searcher08 » Tue Nov 01, 2016 10:22 am
seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 01, 2016 12:24 pm wrote:So says Elitist Feminist Camille Paglia who has nothing to loose...burn the house down ...I'm so safe in my safe room away from all the little people ....I'll never go hungry ...I'm old ..washed up and no one cares what I think anyway
and where is Sounder with the capital letters to tell you all you're in the wrong thread?
who looks more like an old washed up nazi?
Camille Paglia calls Taylor Swift a 'Nazi Barbie
Paglia
shake it off
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM
by seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 01, 2016 10:29 am
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